Skip to main content
A split image of before and after of a new park. Concrete was transformed to a soccer field.

Guiding $1.5 billion for equitable park access

California Department of Parks and Recreation

View project

GreenInfo team: Amanda Kochanek, Andrew Nham, Dan Rademacher, Joseph Stout, Maria Lamadrid, Tim Sinnott, Tom Allnutt

Project years: 2020–2025

Overview

What challenges is this project trying to solve?

  • California voters have consistently supported substantial funding for local parks, but the potential need typically outstrips available funds by at least 10 to 1. It’s difficult to determine which projects will most effectively serve the people who most need park access.
  • The Office of Grants and Local Services within the Department of Recreation works exclusively on funding parks within local cities and other jurisdictions. They needed to communicate their work and vision online and in print reports for the National Park Service.

What were the client’s objectives?

  • Developing accessible and user-friendly tools that grant applicants can use to set a common baseline of park need for any proposed project site statewide.
  • Ensuring that data about parks and people is as current and accurate as possible.
  • Creating online and print reports that convey the department’s vision and leadership in funding equitable access to parks.

Results

  • The ParksforCalifornia.org website serves as an accessible, compelling resource for grant applicants, public officials, and park advocates to see the state’s vision for park equity, understand park need, and use tools for park funding proposals.
  • The site hosts Statewide Comprehensive Outdoor Recreation Plans required for federal funding, as well as other reports covering decades of work on park funding. These reports successfully communicate California’s leadership and vision for park equity to state agencies, elected officials, and park advocates.

The Work

Our work with the California Department of Parks and Recreation has spanned every discipline we know. Data development, spatial analysis, cartography, user research, interface design, and web development. These all come together in ParksforCalifornia.org. The website houses California’s official statewide recreation plans. It also hosts tools that help make better decisions about park funding.

Data Analysis and Improvement

Our parks data, the California Protected Areas Database (CPAD), is a key component of our work with the Department of Parks and Recreation. In collaboration with agency staff and potential grantees, our team reviews and improves parks data near any location where someone has proposed that the state fund a park project.

Our data team has developed, refined, and documented methods to calculate park access, income, and other variables that inform funding decisions. These methods are the foundation for the tools hosted in the Park Access section of ParksforCalifornia.org.

Design Research

Anyone applying for park funds form the state, must use these tools. So we conducted interviews and other research to understand how the tools were working for people. We especially want to know where individuals get confused or are unsure about how to use an application.

Our findings feed directly into our designs of the new versions of the tools currently on the site, all linked from the Park Access section of ParksforCalifornia.org.

Interface Design

The current version of the Parks for California website is based on California’s statewide web design standards, and we undertook substantial additional work in 2024 to redesign the data and map tools on the site to be fully accessible and compliant with WCAG 2.1 AA standards.

This required some basic rethinking of the purposes of several of the tools, to create designs that focus clearly on the core purpose and remove unnecessary information. The result is tools that are easier for everyone to use.

Application Development

We have iteratively developed several versions of the Parks for California website. The most recent— with development sprints in 2020, 2022, and 2024—has emphasized ease of use and compliance with WCAG accessibility standards. The site is built using the open source Django web framework, backed by a PostGIS spatial database.